StorageTek, which was considered a purely tape company when Martin took over, has been trying to promote itself as an overall storage company offering a variety of different storage products and services. While tape continues to be StorageTek's main source of income, the company's disk business with a special emphasis on its new ATA disk-based backup system, BladeStore has been growing strong (see StorageTek to Punch Into Disk Backup and StorageTek Puts Backups on Auto).
Last month, the company announced that disk sales during its second fiscal quarter jumped 19 percent, to $42 million (see StorageTek Keeps on Growth Curve). That included sales of BladeStore as well as StorageTek's D-series primary disk subsystems, which it OEMs from LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc. StorageTek also announced last week that it had slashed prices for its D-series, as it continues to pump up the pressure on its formidable competitors in the disk space.
Obviously, it still has a long way to go before it's considered a disk storage leader in the ranks of EMC, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), or IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).
But Martin, 62, may just be the guy to drive StorageTek's disk business forward, having already helped turn the company around even as the tech bubble was deflating with a lugubrious ppppfffffffffffffffft. StorageTek recently reported its twelfth consecutive quarter of earnings growth, and since Martin came onboard, the company has more than doubled its stock price (see StorageTek Keeps on Growth Curve).
Before joining StorageTek, he worked for Xerox Corp. (NYSE: XRX) for 23 years, finishing his career there in 2000 as president of the company's North American Solutions Group.
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